In the dry desert of New Mexico, an off-road vehicle kicked up a long trail of dust.
Agent Phil Coulson could not understand why he had suddenly been reassigned to New Mexico.
Thinking back to Director Fury's mysterious look before he left, ("You'll know when you get there.") Coulson's curiosity only grew.
When the vehicle came to a stop, Agent Coulson looked ahead.
A massive circular pit appeared before his eyes, like a meteor crater.
Filled with curiosity, Coulson walked toward the center of the crater and discovered an ancient-looking hammer placed right there.
According to reports from the staff:
A few days ago, this hammer had fallen from the sky, smashing out the huge crater. The most astonishing thing was that no one could move the hammer even a little, not even heavy engineering machinery.
This miraculous phenomenon alerted the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. They immediately reported the situation to the director and chased away civilians who were trying to hold a strongman competition using the hammer.
Unwilling to believe it, Coulson gathered some people, tied a rope around the hammer's handle, and fixed the other end to the tow hook of a large-displacement truck.
As the truck accelerated, the thick rope snapped taut instantly, yet the hammer did not budge at all.
The wheels scraped the ground, kicking up clouds of dust and sand.
When the truck floored the accelerator and tried to pull harder, an unexpected scene appeared. Under the force of the rope, the truck's cargo bed tore free from the vehicle with a loud crash and fell to the ground.
This left Agent Coulson utterly astonished.
No matter how heavy this hammer was, it should not have been so heavy that even a truck could not drag it.
He then thought of Corin, 'Mr. Silver Duke seems incredibly strong. Maybe I can find a chance to call him over and see if he can lift this hammer.'
'Or maybe he even knows what this thing is.'
Agent Coulson immediately gave the order to seal off the surrounding area and focus all efforts on studying the hammer.
———
Corin had been a bit idle lately.
After making a fortune at the Hammer Expo, he had not run into any good money-making opportunities for the time being.
Although Alyssa refreshed the underground exchange intelligence for him every day, there was still no price that really caught his interest.
If he wanted to reap more dollars, ordinary ways of making money were already far from satisfying Corin.
Corin had once boldly imagined exchanging for a hypnosis-like skill and controlling the people who ran the entire U.S. dollar printing system.
Just print money directly. Not too much. Print a trillion first.
Anyway, even if those dollars flowed into his account, they would not have any impact on the financial economy.
When he jokingly brought up this idea to Alyssa, she slowly shook her head.
She pulled out her laptop and brought up the annual report of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
The report showed that the U.S. prints between three and five billion banknotes a year.
Based on 250 working days a year, that comes out to an average of 12 to 20 million bills printed per day.
Even if they printed nothing but the highest denomination of 100 dollars, one trillion dollars would be ten billion bills.
At the maximum printing capacity, printing ten billion hundred-dollar bills would still take 500 days, which is one year and five months.
Alyssa's simple round of calculations left Corin marveling in amazement.
He immediately abandoned the idea. Leaving aside how difficult it would be to implement, even if he printed money directly in his own backyard, printing two billion a day, the raw materials for U.S. dollars would not keep up. And with one move affecting everything else, he might get flagged the moment printing started and end up causing a massive scandal.
If cash would not work, then what about digital currency?
Doing some backend operations at a bank and transferring himself ten or twenty billion did not seem completely impossible...
When Corin brought up this new idea, Alyssa looked at him with a strange expression that made him extremely uncomfortable.
Alyssa could not understand why a boss whose money-making ability was already godlike would still have such wild, unrealistic ideas.
She patiently explained that the field of digital currency was even more complex.
In theory, assets could be transferred briefly through technical means, but the probability of being discovered was extremely high.
Bank risk control, blockchain tracking, and cooperation among international websites made this kind of operation almost impossible to pull off.
And the consequences would be severe. Another massive scandal.
Although with Corin's current abilities he was not particularly afraid of standing against a nation, he still wanted to live a quieter life.
The adventures he chose were called exploration. Being forced into danger every single day was just suffering.
Thinking it over again, Corin realized that he really was a mess in certain areas.
Even when exchanging talents from the system, he just grabbed whatever looked good and that he could afford, without considering cost performance at all.
The bad habit of not reading exam questions carefully before answering, back from his school days, had never changed.
Corin's thoughts gradually drifted away.
The calculation Alyssa had done for him made Corin realize his own problems.
Not knowing how to manage money and having no real plan.
But in the next moment, Corin felt relieved again, 'I was a poor student. If I were actually proficient in finance and stocks and all that, that would be abnormal.'
Corin was naturally someone who went with the flow. Grand ideals and ambitions had little to do with him.
'In life, the most important thing is being happy~'
Thinking back to the days when he used to grind Legend in internet cafes, farming materials for the boss, just earning a few thousand yuan a month was enough to make him satisfied.
If it were not for his waist hurting so badly that he could not sit anymore later on, he would not have switched jobs to become a delivery rider.
But now, since fate had given him a second chance, Corin would of course seize it properly.
Returning to the issue of making money, Corin summed up his income channels. One was completing commissions to earn fees, and the other was using the system to exchange items.
Comparatively speaking, using the system to exchange items was obviously more efficient.
Back then, trading a single Jericho missile launcher vehicle for 120 million left a deep impression on Corin.
Finding high-value items to exchange for money seemed to be the key to breaking through.
But what could be exchanged and what could not be exchanged was the real question.
After sending Alyssa away, Corin let his imagination run wild and wondered whether the entire hotel building could be exchanged. He immediately placed his hand on the hotel floor, "Appraise!"
[High-end cashmere carpet → appraised value: 20,000 USD]
"Damn it, who told you to appraise the carpet?"
He lifted the carpet, revealing the flat solid wood floor underneath.
"Appraise!"
[Manhattan XX Hotel Building → 2.5 billion USD (not exchangeable)]
[Items whose disappearance would disrupt planar order → not exchangeable]
This was the first time Corin had encountered a "not exchangeable" prompt, and the system even thoughtfully attached an explanation.
He mulled over that sentence again and again.
Indeed, the items he had exchanged in the past would disappear and turn into account balance.
'"Plane" refers to this world, right?'
Disappearance would disrupt planar order. In other words, if the hotel building were exchanged, the building would disappear, and that disappearance would disrupt the order of this world.
Of course it would. There were so many people inside. If the building suddenly vanished, guests from hundreds of rooms would fall from different heights and die everywhere.
That scene was way too exaggerated. Even Inception would not dare film something like that.
No wonder it could not be exchanged.
Corin started to understand what "not exchangeable" meant.
But from another angle, could it be understood like this, 'Items that have little connection to planar order can be exchanged?'
'What if I tried a building with no people?'
With this question in mind, Corin waited until nightfall and found an unfinished building.
Looking at the building without even windows, Corin said in a low voice:
"Appraise!"
[Pacific Park unfinished building → appraised value: 80 million USD (not exchangeable)]
'This...'
Corin was puzzled, 'This kind of unfinished building is in a remote location and has no residents. How could it still be non-exchangeable?'
Unwilling to give up, Corin wandered aimlessly through the streets, appraising the buildings around him as he walked.
Without realizing it, he arrived at Times Square. Standing among the crowd and looking at the world-famous giant billboards, Corin curiously initiated an appraisal.
[One Times Square → 500 million USD (not exchangeable)]
Without a doubt, the system still showed "not exchangeable."
What Corin did not know was that those unfinished buildings were precisely the kind of existence tied to even more people.
Not only was there government involvement, but also multiple layers of debt disputes and lawsuits on top of lawsuits. Some were even tied to the livelihoods of many ordinary people. Of course he could not exchange them.
In the end, Corin shook his head helplessly.
'I should just find a way to exchange war weapons or other valuable things.'
Those things, whether there are more or less of them, do not have much impact, and they are valuable.
'If I get lucky and find a nuke, a hydrogen bomb, an atomic bomb.'
At that very moment, a sudden change occurred.
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